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Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
This is Dave Brock’s Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Latest Posts
Changing Channel Dynamics, Driving Channel Success In The Face Of Changing Customers
Channels have always been a critical part of most organizations’ Go To Customer strategies. They are critical to extending our coverage of the market, accessing markets with specialized expertise, and in helping provide our customers more complete solutions. Managing channels for optimum performance in the face of rapidly changing buying processes and cloud based solutions creates challenges neither suppliers nor channel players have faced in the past. For example, many of the IT centric products and services are seeing radically changing buying–shifting out of IT into end users. This drives a change in the channel, helping them shift their approaches […]
Getting Customers To Talk To Us
Universally, it seems the biggest challenge sales people face is getting customers to talk to us. Every sales person I meet, most of the articles I read focus on how we get customers to talk to us. There is endless research on why customers and prospect don’t like talking to sales people. We know customers are seeking to self educate–surprisingly visiting our company websites, but not wanting to talk to us. Visiting other websites, participating in other discussions, looking to other resources. It seems that customers want to learn and are actively engaged in learning—but from anyone but us. Increasingly, […]
The Importance Of Establishing A Cadence
It seems in nature, as well as business there is a rhythm to the way things work. Disrupt that rhythm and problems start to occur. We use all sorts of terms to describe that rhythm. In science we describe this as a “steady state.” A system, whether it’s a physical process, chemical process, is in balance with the right flow. Sometimes scientists use the word “equilibrium.” In nature, there are all sorts of rhythms–the tides, the seasons, sun rise/set, currents, and so forth. Disrupt these rhythms, sometimes terrible things happen — a lot of the climate change discussion is really […]
What Is The Role Of Sales Enablement?
I always hate to start a post with a disclaimer or an apology. This post may seem like I’m bashing the sales enablement function and sales enablement professionals. Taken in its most broad context, it’s a critical function. Sales enablement professionals have a tough and important job. Many of the most important initiatives focused on improving sales performance come through sales enablement. Additionally, initiatives like those of the Sales Enablement Society are critical in driving learning among sales enablement professionals, and the ability to standardize practice and increase the value sales enablement professionals and the function provide within the sales […]
The Missing Link In Sales Performance
Every sales executive is constantly struggling to improve the performance of their organizations. The data on percent of sales people achieving their goals, percent of companies making plan, and so forth is appalling. Millions of person hours are spent in trying to understand how to drive sales performance. Billions are spent on tools, training, consulting services all focused on improving the performance of sales people. In virtually every discussion, every popular blog post, the focus of all sales performance initiatives is the sales person. Are we getting the right people? Are we developing the right skills? Do they have the […]
The Buying Process, It Only Happens 1 Time!
Customers struggle with buying. There’s a huge amount of data indicating the majority of customer buying processes end in no decision made. There a number of reasons this occurs, shift is priorities, lack or urgency/attention, fear of change, costs, and so on. One of the major reasons is customers simply struggle with the buying process itself. When you think about it, with the exception of procurement professionals, and with the exception of things we buy frequently–for example toilet paper for the bathrooms, the buying process only happens once. Since most of what we buy only happens once, particularly in a […]